Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:00 on 28 September 2017

I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE off and on for several years now, mainly because it’s something of a de-facto standard in the Java world, and I want to be something in sync with that world. Well, forget it. I’ve come to the conclusion that the annoyances outweigh the advantages:

1. The editor is nowhere near as powerful as a stand-alone editor. That should not be a surprise; it’s competing for the attention of the Eclipse dev team with so many other priorities. By contrast, the dev teams working on text editor projects are totally focused on making those editors better.
2. The editor is sluggish. It doesn’t respond as promptly to my keystrokes as any dedicated text editor I’ve used. This frequently trips me up.
3. It’s almost as if it has an artificial intelligence engine working away to decide whether or not I’d like auto-completion to be offered for an identifier… and then does precisely the opposite of what I want. The feature pops up unbidden and gets in the way when I’m rapidly typing, yet never appears when I’m paused, trying to remember the precise name of something. Typing Control-Space remedies the latter situation, but still.
4. Also, the auto-complete for things like parenthesis and quotes is thoroughly evil. It’s always introducing syntax errors into my code, because it comes up slightly too late; by the time it’s gratuitously inserting something, I’ve already gotten a keystroke or two in edgewise.
5. The default is to indent with hard tabs, and you have to change many settings to defeat this misfeature.
6. There is no simple, easy way (at least none I’ve found, and I’ve tried) to stop it from making files with lines that have trailing white space.
7. When upgrading to a new version of Eclipse, nothing is done to import settings settings from any previous version you were using.
8. When upgrading to a new version, the new version will create a new directory for its workspaces, instead of seeing if there is any existing such area in a default location used by a previous version. The default workspace path changes from version to version. There is no overriding pattern to the defaults.
9. There’s no way to do something as simple and basic as renaming a project in Eclipse Oxygen. If there is; it’s very well-hidden; the action is not listed in the same menu that creating, deleting, and copying projects are listed.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the mess with the workspace directories. I don’t need three separate, inconsistently-named, locations. Yet that is now what I have. And when I attempted to convert and old workspace into a new one, the conversion failed and left some projects inaccessible. I’m sure there’s a solution that would enable me to fix the problem, but it’s simply not worth continually expending effort at making an overly-complex tool behave itself.

So I’m in the process of reverting to a text editor and using that old reliable standby Ant to do the building of my Java projects. A pity, as some of what Eclipse offers (detection of errors as one types, being able to request auto-completion) really is helpful.